Opinion: Lazy summers pay off when students go back to school

Labor Day marked the traditional end of summer. Students are back in school and back to the daily and weekly rhythms of homework, term-long projects and standardized testing.

If you're a parent who spent a hot, harried few months just trying to keep everyone fed, entertained and in one piece, don't fret.

Even if you're dreading an upcoming open house-night at your school, rest assured that no teacher is going to look down on you for not having read the classics to your children nightly or helping them to memorize their multiplication tables.

Let's face it, as parents we go into summer with towering hopes — we'll spend quality time with the finger paints, read oodles of books, try out some science experiments in the backyard and maybe squeeze in some math puzzles and penmanship practice.

Ha! It's already over and we don't even know where it all went.

But don't worry. Even though research has found that "summer melt" means the average kid loses about a month's worth of school knowledge during lazy summers of streaming their favorite TV shows and eating junk food, your child isn't going to bomb this year.

In fact, fully checking out of formal academic activities for a few months might actually be helpful to the formal learning process.

"The process of relearning actually helps students solidify information in their brains, as they work to remember what they once forgot," say Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and Chris Frank, a researcher at ClassDojo, a classroom-to-home communication app used in many elementary schools. "So if your child forgets her times tables, it doesn't have to be a loss; counterintuitive as it may sound, science tells us that young learners may be well served by a thoughtful summer pause so that they can forget — and re-remember."

Our brains are naturally hard-wired to forget information that we don't use frequently, explain Boser and Frank in their blog post, "Forgetting Can Be an Important Part of Learning," on the education website The 74.

The process of forgetting those details and relearning or re-remembering them "can help us gain expertise and allows us to develop a richer form of understanding. The more you forget, the more you learn — because relearning makes the path to [a] specific memory ... more robust. That means parents should see forgetting as an opportunity."

This concept hasn't made it to teacher-training programs yet, but teachers do see the process playing itself out every day in the first few weeks of school.

Sure, students come back rusty. But as they fall back into familiar routines, skills related to close reading, formal writing, math theories and other knowledge banks roar back to life. Trust me, students wobble in the first few days of school, but by the second week, it's obvious how past study informs new learning.

This new understanding of how forgetting and relearning can be beneficial comes at the right time in education. Schools across the country have redesigned their curriculum and their instruction strategies according to the Common Core Standards, which call for a far higher level of analysis and depth in learning even in the youngest grades.

If you remember early elementary school days as focused on nothing more taxing than learning to cut and paste, get it out of your mind. These days, learning addition and subtraction facts is ancillary to understanding how grouping and regrouping work in abstract ways, so that this knowledge can be transferred to more difficult, algebraic concepts as early as first grade.

Story time is still fun, but it's often also packed with lessons about self-awareness, emotional intelligence and vocabulary-building. Students as young as kindergarten are asked to reflect on these stories, sometimes in small groups and other times in writing and pictures, to solidify understanding.

So don't be surprised if, when you attend your school's open-house event, your kids' teachers ask you what your family did over vacation. Teachers want to make connections between what happened last summer to what will happen in the classroom.

Be ready to answer so you can provide some insight into how to link home life and school experiences so your children's learning can be more meaningful — and more memorable.

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